Protecting against data center loss in a data storage system is most commonly achieved using data replication. Data is written to a first data center, then copied to one or more data centers for protection. With two data centers, the system is protected against the loss of any one data center. Typical configurations use three data centers, as they rely on the replication to protect against certain failures local to a data center. With three data centers, data is protected against the concurrent loss of one data center and one further error in one of the remaining data centers. Such a system is expensive, as it multiplies the storage and network capacity required. Another prior method for protection is to use an erasure code spread across the data centers. Some examples include symmetric code, such as 6+6P (6 data and 6 parity) and 7+5P (7 data and 5 parity). Data in a first data center is encoded locally into the erasure code, and the spread across the data centers. Both 6+6P and 7+5P have 12 storage elements in a code stripe. These can be spread across 3 data centers by placing 4 elements on each data center. Both of these codes are more efficient than replication, but have a significant performance impact. Data is encoded into the stripe in a first data center, a subset of the elements are stored on the first data center, and the remaining subsets are stored on the other data centers. This means that data is not protected against any type of loss (local or data center) until the entire code stripe is stored. This synchronous process uses WAN bandwidth for every write and suffers from round-trip latency. Further, such erasure codes provide very limited protection in cloud environments. They suffer from long reconstruct/rebuild times as such recovery requires data be transferred over the WAN. Cloud systems operate at very large scale, and there are large numbers of storage components in each data center. Thus, the probability of a data center having some component failed, off line or otherwise unavailable is very high. It is therefore critical to have strong local protection in addition to data center loss protection.